1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and techniques for organizing documents. More specifically, the present invention relates to a technique for determining editing instructions and classification information for documents.
2. Related Art
Recent advances in technology have made it possible for individuals and organizations to remotely access increasing amounts of information. For example, networks (such as the Internet) and modern search engines allow individuals to retrieve information (henceforth referred to as documents) from a large database or repository of documents (including content from multiple web pages and websites).
As the number of documents and various types of content increases, it is increasingly difficult for individuals and organizations to avoid information overload during searches of these document repositories. One approach to this problem is to restrict the number of documents provided to individuals or organizations based on an estimated relevancy of the information in the documents. For example, in response to a search query, many search engines return snippets or subsets of one or more documents (henceforth referred to as results) that closely match the search query, including: words, terms, keywords, phrases, synonyms, and/or paraphrases in or associated with the search query (henceforth collectively referred to as keywords). In addition, many search engines tailor or personalize results based on user profiles, which include user-defined interests (such as document categories) and summaries of previous user searches. Note that the ability to provide results involves identifying both the relevant documents and the relevant positions in these documents. In the case of content that is in an alphanumeric or text format, the keywords can provide the necessary classification information, which facilitates organizing (and thus, searching) of the documents in a repository.
Unfortunately, these techniques are less effective for content types other than text (such as images and videos) because keywords may not be sufficient to identify either the relevant documents or the relevant positions in these documents. Furthermore, these difficulties are compounded when the content of interest is subjective and/or dynamic (i.e., time varying) in nature (such as fashion or popular culture). Thus, it may be difficult to sort through photographs of celebrities or models to determine which photographs and/or what portion of a given photograph are currently of interest to individuals.
Hence what is needed is an improved technique for organizing documents without the problems listed above.